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“I had an exorcism,” Elise Loehnen says on the Netflix trailer for The Goop Lab. Except she didn’t. Not actually, “but, um, I know I said it, and people are like — my dad is like, ‘you had an exorcism?’ I was like, wait, no! What?’”

Loehnen, Goop’s chief content officer and Gwyneth Paltrow’s oft-described right-hand woman, is on the phone from the company’s headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif. A cohost, along with Paltrow, of the six-part series set to debut Jan. 24, Loehnen said she dropped the exorcism word as a joke during an episode featuring a chiropractor-energy healer who claims muscles and fascia and tendons can bind up and store energy and it’s all about returning that energy to a free-flowing state.

'I was like, wait, no!' Did Goop's chief content officer really have an exorcism?Back to video

“He’s like the puppet-master of your energy, “Loehnen explained. “He sort of manipulates your energy field, and you move. You’re not really in possession of your body.” Some people go into an “S,” or wave formation, she explained, though that wasn’t her experience. “I think people will watch that episode and be like, ‘what is happening? And I need to get on a table and have that experience.’”

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The episode is “sort of typical of the content that we do,” Loehnen said, meaning that while there may not be a shred of science to support the notion that energy healing heals anything, “something is happening here and we don’t quite understand what it is so we’re not going to dismiss it.”

Perhaps not, though critics are certainly dismissing Goop’s latest hippie offering as more pseudoscientific nonsense. “When you use the word, ‘lab,’ it may raise expectations that science will somehow be involved, unless of course you are referring to a Labrador retriever,” writes Bruce Y. Lee of Forbes. The series, maintains the University of Alberta’s Timothy Caulfield, is a barely veiled infomercial that will only add to the dumbing down of critical thinking.

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Goop’s track record isn’t exactly encouraging. From its jade eggs “for your yoni” and vaginal steaming to wearable stickers that “rebalance the energy frequency in our bodies,” Goop’s airy lifestyle brand has been called the Internet’s “kooky rich aunt.”

When you use the word, 'lab,' it may raise expectations that science will somehow be involved

While Netflix is being criticized for enabling a “known woo peddler,” the streaming giant isn’t the only one giving Paltrow a lucrative platform. For years western medicine has pooh-poohed and brushed aside women’s health concerns, handing Goop the entry it needed. Others say Goop is peddling an illusion of female empowerment and that it’s mantra of “self-optimization” is a kind of faux feminism aimed at the already privileged and empowered upper class. “It’s not like there are oodles of poor women going around saying, ‘Give me Goop products,’’ notes bioethecist Arthur Caplan.

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The backlash started moments after the one-minute and eight second trailer for goop Lab dropped. On it, Loehnen teases that the show will explore things that “may seem out there or too scary,” among them, psychedelics, psychic mediums, energy healing and cold therapy. “This is dangerous,” says a bearded guy, “it’s unregulated,” says another voice over.

One segment features a mother of three and psychic medium convinced she can commune with the deceased and who believes missed calls from an unrecognized number on your cell phone could be a message from a loved one who has “crossed over.” “It’s kind of crazy what happens,” Loehnen said of the episode.

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There’s a sprinkling of science in the The Goop Lab, including an episode on longevity featuring University of Southern California and Yale School of Medicine biologists. But the series is more entertainment, not science, Loehnen said. It’s “certainly not anti-science,” she added. “We are not making any claims that we can’t substantiate or are not well documented.”

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While Goop wasn’t as “buttoned-up” as it should have been in the past (in 2018 it agreed to pay California regulators a US$145,000 fine for unsubstantiated claims that its jade eggs could balance a woman’s hormones) the company now has a science and regulatory team in place headed by a MIT PhD, as well as a former Stanford professor, Loehnen said.

Gwyneth Paltrow at the In Goop Health Summit San Francisco 2019 on Nov. 16, 2019Ian Tuttle/Getty Images for Goop

Goop approaches things outside the status quo “from a place of non-judgment and open-mindedness,” she said.

“The whole idea of hysteria comes from the womb, right? For so long, for centuries, women have been told that we’re crazy, that it’s in our heads. …We’ve been dismissed and ignored by our doctors.”

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“One of the things we’re really proud of at Goop is creating a place where you can take autonomy over your health,” Loehnen said.

But McGill University biological scientist Jonathan Jarry says Goop is sowing distrust of the present-day medical establishment “in favour of a dude in Florida who claims to talk to angels,” referring to a Goop-loved “medical medium” who claims that a supernatural spirit gives him medical information from the future.

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“You can’t make good decisions if a fake expert is fleecing you. And that’s what Goop is. It’s a massively lucrative factory of fake experts,” Jarry said.

You can’t make good decisions if a fake expert is fleecing you

What’s more, “instead of moving female health forward into therapeutic alliances and discussions of scientific evidence, it pushes it backwards by returning to the 1800s and the traveling medicine shows,” he said.

With its celebrity ringleader and enraptured audiences, Goop has “harnessed the power of the anecdote,” Jarry added, and by dubbing the show The Goop Lab they’re dog whistling to their detractors. “They’re stealing the language of science to pretend that their reliance on, ‘does this feel good or not,’ is some sort of marker of scientific rigour.”

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Worried about being accused of “mansplaining” Goop’s appeal, Jarry encouraged us to interview women, which we did. Dr. Michelle Cohen, an assistant professor in family medicine at Queen’s University, said Goop’s messaging isn’t at all that removed from the messages beamed at women for decades from women’s magazines and the old patriarchal idea “of women not being good enough and our bodies being broken” and if only we had the newest anti-aging cream or supplement we could somehow “better” ourselves.

For too long, women’s health, and especially women’s sexual heath, has been considered “too trivial, too mysterious or opaque for anybody to really take a serious interest in,” Cohen said. “And those feelings of being frustrated and misunderstood by the healthcare system are perfect for predatory wellness organizations like Goop to latch on to.”

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Caplan said mainstream academe needs to put on its “big boy pants” and challenge Goop’s messaging. But while Goop may be the crazy rich aunt, even prestigious hospitals and medical universities are embracing the “crazy uncle” of medical practice, Caplan and Caulfield once wrote, meaning alternative practitioners who offer aromatherapy or homeopathy or other science-devoid therapies. Caulfield once called out the U of Alberta for promoting a workshop on “spoon bending and the power of the mind.” Ontario’s Georgian College scrapped a planned three-year homeopathy diploma program in 2018, one day after the Post published a scathing report on the “magical thinking” of homeopathy.

Everyone is trying to monetize the wellness wave, Caplan says. “The worry is that if they don’t offer it, the other guy will.”’

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